President Donald Trump's chances of winning the 2020 election are close to zero, if you go by the latest opinion polls. A vast majority of Americans think he will end up as a one-term president. Outside of America, almost everyone thinks the Trump show is over. The Democrat think tanks are sure he will loose and even that he won't leave the White House after losing.
But the fact is, the American Liberals (bolstered by a flood of Liberal converts) will help Trump win the presidency.
The Latest Polls
The latest opinion polls do not paint a rosy picture for Trump. He trails Democratic opponent Joe Biden by as much as 10 points nationally. Biden is also leading in several key swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida and Wisconsin. Biden's lead in these crucial states ranges from four to eight points. At the same time, Trump isn't leading by wide margins in strongholds like Texas, Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina.
However, the Republicans are not shattered as yet. Neither is Trump himself. Former President Barack Obama warned the Democrats not to be carried away by the early victories over Trump. In a Zoom fundraiser for his former V-P Obama warned the party against complacency.
More pertinently (or funnily, depending on how you look at it) Obama said the fact that Trump did win in 2016 makes him a dangerous commodity. "We can't be complacent or smug or suggest that somehow it's so obvious that this president hasn't done a good job, because look, he won once, and it's not like we didn't have a good clue as to how he was going to operate the last time," Obama said.
The core of the matter is that (and Obama knows it as much as Hillary Clinton knows it), that Trump won against odds in 2016 makes him precariously poised on another win.
Economy Will Hold the Key
President Trump is fighting one too many vicious battles. First, the whole world believes that his strategy on coronavirus epidemic floundered. It should comfort him that his loyal political constituency does not hold him responsible for the virus epidemic.
If the economy stabilizes in the next four months, or if some of the worst fallout on the jobs front is rolled back by then, Trump will likely be exonerated of the misadventure of dealing with the virus in a light manner in the beginning. Bill Clinton won an election telling the electorate "it's the economy, stupid."
Trump understands better than anyone else that the economy will hold the clue to the keys of the White House this November. That's why he was against the China-style total lockdowns in the beginning. The high number of coronavirus deaths has certainly besmirched his legacy but if he can showcase the beginnings of an American economic revival by the fall, his 2020 chances would be as good 2016's.
Trust Biden to Fix His Own Mess
Second, Trump's response to the racial equality movement in the wake of the killing of Black American George Floyd was widely criticized for being unsympathetic and polarising. However, the wild fringe of the Black Lives Matter movement -- the liberals and the anarchists who hijacked the movement - have come to Trump's rescue.
If Trump wins the second term indeed, he would be thankful to them. Police reform was overdue in the United States. Measurers to ensure racial equality were overdue in the United States. The fact that these never happened is not Trump's blame alone. Well, Barack Obama and Biden are promising to do things they never did when they were in power for ten years. When Biden emerges from his basement, he will devote a lot of time preaching about fixing a system he helped create in the first place.
Black Lives Matter and How Liberals Rescued Trump
The Trump campaign would have been dead in the water by now unless the liberals had hijacked the Black Lives Matter movement. No one doubts if Black lives matter. No one defends the legacy of slavery which was beaten and buried with the defeat of the Confederates in the Civil War. But the liberal vanguard of the movement took the battle too far for an average American to stomach.
The latest is that there's a move to topple the statue of Abraham Lincoln in a major park in Washington DC. Statues of a great line of American icons from George Washington to Ulysses Grant and from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt have been pulled down or defaced. The protesters did not spare Francis Scott Key, who wrote the American national anthem 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and even abolitionist hero Matthias Baldwin.
In a weird stretch of the imagination, activist Shaun King decided that the statues of Jesus should also be pulled down as long as they were depicted in a white hue. In a hugely symbolic gesture a couple of weeks ago, protesters in Washington set fire to the centuries-old St Jones Church. But in an equally huge symbolic gesture, President Trump brushed aside raging protests, walked down to the church and defended its right to exist.
The BLM movement saw many such moments when it descended into anarchist, apolitical, anti-religious and even anti-unitarian overtones. The pampered liberal elite in the megapolises would relish such expressions of state-less euphoria, but a vast majority of ordinary Americans living in small towns and countrysides would resent the reigning iconoclasm. For Trump, that would turn into votes.
Clinton Had Similar Leads in 2016
Biden is leading Trump by 10 points as per the latest polls. For context, Hillary Clinton had a six-point lead over Trump at this stage in the 2016 election. Yet she lost in the electoral college count, despite winning more popular votes. History could repeat. Trump is trying to pivot this election away from his early perceived follies in coronavirus handling. To stop him in the tracks, the Democrats will push their deeply polarising agenda harder. That's their hubris, don't expect them to change the tack.
In a deeply polarised US, Trump has a better chance to win 270 electoral college votes than Joe Biden.
